The Cause Behind the Glorious Revolution: The Overthrew of James II

Holland’s William of Orange and English opposition leaders dethroned England’s King James II, in 1689, in what became known as the Glorious Revolution. This revolution came as a result of James’s having a son, whom the revolutionaries feared he would raise a Catholic, which would have likely ensured continual Catholic rule in England after his death.  

In 1660, the English restored James’s elder brother, King Charles II, to the throne. This came after the radical Puritan Parliament failed to govern effectively after Oliver Cromwell died. 

Despite Charles’s pledge to pardon the parliamentary revolutionaries in the Declaration of Breda, many of his father’s executioners—or those considered seriously involved in Charles I’s execution—were exempted from this pledge. Several were executed, and others were sentenced to life in prison. 

Despite revenge for his father’s execution, though, Charles ruled popularly, overturning many of the stringent Puritanical laws and allowed greater denominational freedom.[1] To English who enjoyed entertainment, Charles patronized the arts, and unlike his uptight predecessors, he lived an incredibly philanderous life, having numerous children out of wedlock.[2] 

It did not take long, however, for the political disputes between the king and parliament to develop that had caused so much grief in the government for Charles’s father and grandfather. Charles was more agreeable than his father, but he still ruled with few of the reforms that Members of Parliament during the English Civil War supported.[3] 

These disputes, however, were not enough to plunge the nation into another civil war. The bloodshed of the 1840s provided a strong incentive for both supporters and opponents of the king’s policies to work out their differences politically. This produced the first rise of political parties in the Whigs, who opposed the king’s policies, and the royalist Tories.[4]

In foreign policy, Charles attracted great ire for his aggressive foreign policy toward Holland. The English people were more sympathetic toward the Protestant Dutch, who were viewed as underdogs fighting for their survival against the much larger Catholic French nation.[5] As all wars that England waged, this one with the Dutch brought heavy debt and weakened the king’s power. 

Although the general public never found out, in the Treaty of Dover, Charles promised to convert to Catholicism in exchange for £200,000 to secure his position apart from parliamentary financing. This would have been highly unpopular had his subjects found out about it, and Charles never set a date at which he would convert.[6] 

Things came to a head on foreign policy when, in 1677, parliament refused to further fund their monarch unless Charles formed an alliance with the Dutch. Charles categorically refused, but they managed to convince him to allow his daughter Mary to wed the Protestant Dutch Prince William of Orange. This would turn out to be a major political victory for English Protestants.[7]

During this time, widespread fears grew of a Catholic conspiracy, especially after Titus Oates reported on a Catholic plot to assassinate the king, in 1678. Despite much unreasonable paranoia, the real possibility of being ruled by a Catholic monarch remained a pressing concern.[8] 

Adding to the hysteria was the fact that Charles’s younger brother James had converted to Catholicism, in 1667, and openly practiced his religion.[9] With no separation of church and state in this era, opposition to a Catholic monarch entailed more than simple religious prejudice. The religion of the monarch was the religion endorsed by the government, and most of the time the religion forced on the population.

The Whigs introduced an exclusionist bill that would have barred James from inheriting the throne. But Charles vehemently opposed any such exclusion. Despite the difference in religion, one thing that kept many of the Tories in line with the king was that James’s daughter Mary was next in line. Being a Protestant, they believed whatever damage James did in what little time he was likely to reign could as easily be undone by Mary once he died.[10]

Charles died in 1685, and James did not disappoint the expectations of anti-Catholics of what a government under him would look like. When he found parliament unwilling to work with him in his vision of Catholic toleration, he sent MP’s home and ruled alone. He then appointed Catholics to military, academic, and political posts to increase the influence of his religion—and no doubt to strengthen his position.[11] 

This deeply strained relations between king and parliament. This, however, was still not enough to bring the latter to repeat the civil war of the 1640s. Furthermore, the doctrine of the divine right of kings held strong, and many English believed the failure of the republic after Cromwell’s death had been a sign of God’s displeasure with the execution of Charles I.[12]

The final straw came when James and his wife Mary of Modena had a son, James Francis Edward, in 1688. This ensured James a male heir, whom he would almost certainly raise Catholic. This created the prospect of being ruled by a Catholic dynasty in perpetuity. 

At this point, William of Orange, who had long feared his country’s very existence could be threatened with a strong alliance between England and France, reached out to allies in the English Parliament and plotted an invasion of England to overthrow James.[13] 

The size of William’s Dutch naval force was four times the size of the Spanish Armada that had failed to invade England a century earlier. After landing at Torbay on November 5, 1688, William held his numerically inferior army back while anti-Catholic riots broke out in English cities, forcing James to turn his army on those instead of facing William. 

Meanwhile, James suffered massive desertions, and upon his return to London, the king found that his own daughter Anne had joined the Orangists. Rather than stick around to find out if his opponents would be more lenient with him than they had with his father, James fled the country into exile. William and Mary agreed to the Declaration of Rights, which placed limits on the monarchy, and on February 13, 1689, they accepted the throne as joint-monarchs.[14]

….

James faced a difficult road when he began his reign because of the widespread anti-Catholicism that permeated, which had led to his father’s execution. Once crowned, he did not win any friends among the overwhelming Protestant majority with his strong pro-Catholic policies, which only confirmed the fears of a Catholic monarch that many of his subjects held all along. 

James’s Protestant opponents in Parliament and among the people had been willing to suffer through his rule until he died, and his Protestant daughter inherited the throne. However, since Charles refused to even countenance the exclusion of his brother, it was even more improbable that James would agree to pass over his son in favor of his Protestant daughter Mary, who was married to a foreign monarch, William of Orange. 

The Glorious Revolution, as James’s overthrow came to be called—primarily because it overthrew an unpopular king without the civil war that accompanied the overthrow of Charles I—showed not only the complete conversion of England to Protestantism, but that the age of absolutist monarchy had ended.

Notes

[1] Keith Wrightson: An Unsettled Settlement: The Restoration Era, 1660-1688, Open Yale courses, 2009.

[2] John Redwood, “Lord Rochester and the Court of Charles II,” History Today 24 (May 1974), accessed April 11, 2016, http://www.historytoday.com/john-redwood/lord-rochester-and-court-charles-ii.

[3] Keith Wrightson: An Unsettled Settlement.

[4] Mark Goldie, Richard Ollard, Clare Jackson, “The Restoration (In Our Time, 15/2/01),” Restoration Archive, YouTube, May 18, 2015, accessed April 5, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP9xMnYEAW8.

[5] Keith Wrightson: An Unsettled Settlement.

[6] R. Hutton, “The Making of the Secret Treaty of Dover, 1668-1670,” The Historical Journal, 29 (July, 1986), 301.

[7] Keith Wrightson: An Unsettled Settlement.

[8] Kathryn Walls, “Titus Oates as ‘Monumental Brass” in ‘Absalom and Achitophel’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 50:3 (Summer, 2010), 546.

[9] “James II (1633-1701),” bbc.co.uk, BBC, 2014, accessed April 11, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/james_ii.shtml.

[10] Mark Goldie, Richard Ollard, Clare Jackson, “The Restoration (In Our Time, 15/2/01),” Restoration Archive, YouTube, May 18, 2015, accessed April 5, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP9xMnYEAW8.

[11] “James II (1633-1701),” bbc.co.uk, BBC, 2014, accessed April 11, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/james_ii.shtml.

[12] Mark Goldie, Richard Ollard, Clare Jackson, “The Restoration (In Our Time, 15/2/01),” Restoration Archive, YouTube, May 18, 2015, accessed April 5, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP9xMnYEAW8.

[13] Edward Vallance, “The Glorious Revolution,” bbc.co.uk, BBC, February 17, 2011.

[14] Vallence, “The Glorious Revolution.